


More Violence

by Apatheia_Jane



Category: Angel: the Series, Fight Club (1999)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-27
Updated: 2011-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:55:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apatheia_Jane/pseuds/Apatheia_Jane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows the same things I do, but for completely different reasons. None of us are beautiful or unique, we are collectively a sea of decaying organic matter.</p><p>I know that, because I’m a part of it.</p><p>She knows that, because she’s not.</p><p>Not organic, and certainly not human, not at all. She’s fucking blue, for starters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Violence

**Author's Note:**

> Post s5 for AtS, AU for Fight Club.

I remember preaching into a loudspeaker, the continual background for the space monkeys at work, Tyler dogma 101. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

It was knowledge always present and assumed, like the way people know that the sky is blue, even if they haven’t seen a cloudless sky in months. I remember ringing up my father and asking, ‘Now what?’ I already knew, even then.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Neither am I. No one is.

And then I met her.

She knows the same things I do, but for completely different reasons. None of us are beautiful or unique, we are collectively a sea of decaying organic matter.

I know that, because I’m a part of it.

She knows that, because she’s not.

Not organic, and certainly not human, not at all. She’s fucking blue, for starters.

I think she used to be a god. Monarch of gods, or something. It’s a bit hard getting information out of her, because she doesn’t really consider it worth her time talking to the vermin, and yeah, that’s me. That’s all of us.

But it’s not her.

She wasn’t tapped during homework, like most of the men here. I don’t know how she found us, but she tore open the basement doors, and just walked in. The fight broke apart, no longer the centre of attention. She strode purposefully to the centre of the group, as the two men in the centre melted back into the crowd, with her hair plastered to her head, and the blood running out of it down her face and neck. She spoke only two words: more violence.

No one told her to take off her shirt. No one was going to enforce two men to a fight. And if someone went limp, that just meant that his fighting was over.

When she was the only one left standing, she sank to the floor, head down and hunched impossibly low and dejected. One by one, in small groups, we picked ourselves up and made our way out. I let a young guy I’d fought the week before help me up, then waved him out the door. I leaned against the table, and stayed put.

She was dangerous. Perhaps more than a bunch of human men could handle. No one in Fight Club went there looking for an easy fight, but some came there looking specifically for the rush of going head to head with another guy, both of you evenly matched, both of you looking for that one blow that would end the fight, in your favour. It didn’t take long to figure out that that one blow would never come for her. Maybe there are others strong enough for that, but we’re just men, God's unwanted children. We hit her, and her head snaps around, and she bleeds a bit more, and her hair gets more matted, and she hits back. Every time, until she’d gone through all of us.

On the other hand, there were men here who hadn’t been beaten in months, had barely broken a sweat some nights, and this was clearly the most satisfying night that they’d had in those months, in or out of Fight Club.

I wanted her back, night after night.

She’d come from a fight, and been left wanting more. Some guys, they need to fight to get a shitty week out of their system, maybe a couple of times a year. Some guys, they always need a fight.

This looks like the result of the most monumentally fucked up year to end all fuckups, the kind that leads to always needing a fight until you pick the fight that kills you.

She hadn’t moved at all. I waited for her to, to pick herself back up and head somewhere else. And then I stopped waiting, circled around her, and approached her face on. She didn’t look up at me, but she did grace me with a second sentence: You are nothing to me.

I am nothing special. I am also the closest thing thousands of men across this country have to a god. In Tyler we trust, the thought that he doesn’t know I hear.

She is fascinating to me, I let her know. Humans are nothing special. Men are nothing special. She is different. I ask her questions, most of which she ignores. How’d she get so strong? Where’d she learn to fight like that? Why is her skin blue? Does she have somewhere to go? Does she have a name? Who did all the blood that she walked in wearing come from?

Her name is Ilyria, and she is all she has left.

She did not throw away her kingdom out of boredom, self-destructive impulses or issues with her father, if she even had one. All the things she owned, she owned them. Any single part of her kingdom, it in itself meant nothing to her. It is only now that they are all gone, now that she clings to the memory of all that she could do with them, that they own her.

We all dreamed that one day we’d all become rock gods and movie stars, and then learnt that it’s never going to happen, and reacted in violence.

She was a god, and has learnt that she will never be one again, and of course, reacted in violence.

I told her that Fight Club was everywhere. The world is overrun with humans, and even we don’t like it.

She cocked her head to one side, and asked me if violence was enough, enough to cope with the grief, enough to live on.

If Fight Club wasn’t enough, if you outgrow it, there is always the option of escalation. Stop destroying yourself, and start destroying civilisation. I didn't tell her that then. I just told her to be back here tomorrow.

The next morning, I made a new set of rules.


End file.
